Most organisations have established business processes consisting of a series of tasks or activities intended to achieve a desired outcome. For example, financial institutions will most likely have a set of activities which, when ordered in a particular sequence, achieves the desired outcome of processing a loan request from an applicant resulting in either acceptance or rejection of the request.
Whilst most organisations have established business processes, it is generally recognised that at least some of the processes are non-optimal and have various deficiencies and inefficiencies. In order to address these problems with established business processes, organisations sometimes use a change management process in an attempt to identify and remove deficiencies or inefficiencies within the processes.
In this respect, flow charting methods have been widely used as a means of identifying individual steps in a business process. However, using a flow charting technique is generally considered an informal process and does not usually include any identification of resource usage or accountability for individual process steps in a consistent manner. As a result, this technique is considered to be of limited value.
An approach that is intended to address the failings of flow charting techniques, generally referred to as the Activity Based Costing or “ABC” process, proposes the use of templates in order to record the activities and the resource levels and accountabilities in a consistent format. However, the ABC technique fails to accurately identify and represent business process failure. Accordingly, ABC techniques are also considered to be of limited effectiveness.
Other techniques have been proposed including time and motion study and time recordal techniques. However, it has been found that these techniques either do not readily identify superfluous activities in the business process or do not accurately represent the activities that are actually performed in order to achieve the desired outcome of the business process.
Previous techniques have generally been carried out manually, and utilising forms, questionnaires, charts and the like for developing data which is then manually manipulated. Such techniques are relatively time consuming and involve substantial input from managers and consultants. Further, such techniques are prone to error through the manual work needed and subjective decision-making.
It is therefore desirable to provide a system and method to facilitate recognition of inefficiencies and deficiencies in processes and to develop improved processes.
It is also desirable to provide a system and method of managing a change process.
It is also desirable to provide a system and method for improving business processes using existing process steps as a base.
It is also desirable to provide a system and method of managing a change process by establishing a set of process activities based on an analysis of existing process steps.
It is also desirable to provide a method of sorting desirable activities from non-desirable activities in a business process.
It is also desirable to provide a method of deriving a change process using activity categories to establish optimum sets of activities to achieve desired outcomes.
It is also desirable to assign accountabilities for changes to a cross-functional process to the specific business functions within organisation(s) that will perform them.
It is also desirable to provide a system and method for deriving a change process that harnesses computer power to analyse processes and develop change programs.